Except of course it wasn’t the first video to emerge, remember Drip Drop, LEAK and the following posts?

Fake blood is taken from: GameMaker Blog

There are a number of factors determining the effectiveness of a screenshot, of which the contents of the picture is just one.

I have seen countless games advertised with a screenshot of the game’s menu. The game’s menu for heavens sake. These ‘gamemaker teams‘, as they are often called are meant to be encouraging you to download their game, not a freaking menu.

Taking screenshots of the first level or first stage of game won’t be produce a good preview either. Often many of the features offered in a game won’t be available at this early point so any screenshots taken here won’t be exciting or showcase many of the programs features.

Once you’ve found the right time and place to take a screenshot you also need to consider how you are going to take it. There are lots of freeware programs out there which offer screenshot features however you don’t need any of them!

Taking a basic screenshot is simple, just press the [Prt Scr] key on your keyboard (above [Insert]) and paste into any graphics editor or even other software such as Word. However this probably isn’t the best choice for taking your screenshots unless your game runs in full screen and at a decent resolution as otherwise you will have to crop your screenshot down so only the active game window is visible.

Fortunately there is a very simple solution at hand which doesn’t involve downloading any additional software or any extra work on your behalf. Instead of pressing just the [Prt Scr] key press [Prt Scr] along with [Alt]. This takes a screenshot of just the active window. Open up your graphics program and paste, no more cropping away of your desktop!

The power of an effective screenshot is unbelievable and should not be underestimated, although of course a good screenshot can not make up for a poorly scripted and sprited game.

MarkUp: Effective screenshots is taken from: GameMaker Blog

Much neater than the usual ||||||||||||||s I hope you’ll agree.

Gamemakerblog is online

An example of the potential colour customisation:

Resource: Status bar maker is taken from: GameMaker Blog

The one vital rule:

1. Not as a bitmap (.bmp)

If you don’t know the differences between different image formats, and how data relating to the picture is stored you might want to check out this article on Wikipedia about the way bitmap files are stored.

Using a bitmap, such as the 904KB image on shcorporation‘s freewebs site slows down your website hugely. Do you really think someone wants to sit and wait for an image to load just because someone can’t be bothered, or isn’t aware of how to make an image web-ready?

Okay, not a bitmap – but what should I use?

.gif, .jpg and .png are all fine.

Personally I prefer saving files in the .PNG (vector) format, because as wikipedia puts it, there are some distinct advantages over the other potential formats:

• • On most images, PNG can achieve greater compression than GIF (see the section on filesize, below).
  • PNG gives a much wider range of transparency options than GIF, including alpha-channel transparency.
  • PNG gives a much wider range of color depths than GIF (truecolor up to 48-bit compared to 8-bit 256-color), allowing for greater color precision, smoother fades, etc.
  • GIF supports animation while PNG does not.
  • PNG images are widely supported, but not as widely supported as GIF images

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PNG#Comparison_with_other_file_formats

Screenshot formats is taken from: GameMaker Blog